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Friday, January 31, 2014

Church Dedication in India

January 2014

I recently had an opportunity to make a return visit with our ministry partner, Khen
Tombing, at Manipur State in Northeast India. I met up with the team that had arrived
earlier and it was wonderful to hear about their experiences prior to my
arrival. They visited three rural
villages and set up "health camps" to care for and help many people
who often have no access to any healthcare.
They had a great time in these villages, sharing testimonies of God's
work in their lives, and performing an evangelism skit for the people they
met.

I arrived on Saturday evening and
saw that we were scheduled to visit three churches the next day. We worshiped at Munhoih (Good News) Presbyterian Church, a church we helped to
fund and dedicate just a year ago. This
church opened its doors with about 40 members and now has about 120. What an honor it was to be invited to praise
God with these members for His work in growing this congregation.

Following this service, we headed to the dedication service for Ningthoukhong Presbyterian Church,
our second church plant with Khen Tombing's ministry. The leaders there gave all of us special attire
that would be culturally appropriate for worship with new believers from the
Meiti tribe, a predominantly Hindu people group. I had the privledge of bringing a message about the promises
of Jesus to build His church. Again, we were all honored to meet our new
brothers and sisters in Christ and worship our God with them.

The evening service was at Rayburn
Presbyterian Church, and the service was full, both in attendance and in
activity. There were several special things planned for our team, in addition
to the team once again performing their evangelism skit for the congregation.
They were applauded with loud cheers during and after the presentation. After
giving my first full length sermon ever, translated by Khen and making it twice
as long, we also got to take communion with the congregation. What a great
service to end a very full and amazing day.

Most of the team headed back to the US, however, Roy Oishi and I ventured on to Yangon, Myanmar for the next portion of our missions trip. You can read more about our time there in my next post.